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Headquartered in Istanbul, Tatilbudur.com has two main sales channels, online (the website) and offline (a call centre). In Turkey, customers tend to spend a lot of time researching a holiday online, but typically make a final purchase via a call centre. Despite being an “online” travel agency, Tatilbudur.com’s call centre actually generates the majority of sales. Tatilbudur.com and its agency SEM needed a way to connect digital campaigns’ performance with call centre sales.

Knowing that digital marketing optimisations needed to be based on online as well as offline sales, Tatilbudur.com and performance agency SEM took steps to measure conversions ending with a call to the call centre. SEM’s Digital Intelligence and Performance Team implemented Google Tag Manager to track online conversions using Google Analytics and AdWords. They also developed a way to track offline conversions, by initiating a new ecommerce tag associated with a specific landing page. When users completed a purchase via the call centre, they would receive a notification, at which point the offline conversion could be counted.

If the user had visited the website before, Google Analytics would connect the visit to the landing with the user’s previous on-site interactions. The same logic applied to AdWords activity: if the user had clicked an ad within 30 days before the visit to the landing page, then the conversion could be recorded properly thanks to the AdWords conversion tracking tag.

As a result of this approach, Tatilbudur.com was able measure both online and online-to-offline conversions. Because AdWords was able to capture 266% more conversions than before, Tatilbudur.com was able to measure the cost per acquisition more accurately – and see that it was approximately 72% lower than previously thought. Before integration, non-branded (generic) campaigns accounted for 50% of online conversions, while after the integration it emerged that they actually accounted for more than 62% of online-to-offline conversions.

"The online-to-call-centre integration was a turning point for us to drive our marketing strategy. It helped us to track the real performance of our campaigns. Our customers have multi-channel behaviour, so we had to capture their behaviour in order to make better marketing decisions. Yekta Yenilmez, CMO, Tatilbudur.com"

Overall, Tatilbudur.com and SEM gained a more realistic conversion rate for campaigns and products. Thanks to the new insights, the team increased their focus on non-branded campaigns, which showed better performance. And because more conversions are needed in order to use data-driven solutions, they’ve also been able to adopt automated bidding going forward.